Interactive fiction works can be challenging for literary readers, even those interested in other sorts of electronic literature, because of the text-based interface and because of the way in which these works require detailed exploration, mapping, and solution. Works in this form are often less visually rewarding, and the rewards they do offer are only attained with time and effort. . . . Understanding how interactive fiction works, and how it has developed over the past three decades, is an essential part of the puzzle of literary computing. Characteristics of interactive fiction
- Formally, a work of interactive fiction (often called a "game," even if it does not exhibit the typical qualities of a game) is an interactive computer program.
- The world model simulates different areas, called "rooms," and the people, creatures, and objects that are in them. Rooms are connected in a graph, and the things they contain can themselves contain things.
- Rather than imagining a fixed number of nodes of text, it is helpful to see the output text as being produced because of the simulation of the player character and the environment.
The parser and world model are essential to IF
. . . it is conventional to refer to the player character in the second person, a feature of interactive fiction that is often remarked upon because it is so uncommon in other types of literary writing. Interactive fiction as potential narrative - One perspective on interactive fiction is that it is potential narrative Along with other useful perspectives (computer program, dialog system, simulation, game, riddle), the idea that interactive fiction is potential narrative encourages the consideration of how it is potential — what space of narratives is defined — and of how the elements of IF correspond to narrative elements HISTORY AND CONTEXT [subheadings]
- Early mainframe games
- The Commercial Era
- IF Community
- Interactive fiction and the origin of MUDs
- Relationship to gaming and graphical adventures
- Literary aspects: the novel, the riddle :
In Twisty Little Passages (Montfort 2003), I suggested a different literary connection, to a poetic form, the riddle. The tradition of the riddle is long-standing, although the form is now often dismissed as a trivial amusement for children. Riddles are among the first English poems and, while they have sometimes appeared as parlor amusements, some poets, including May Swenson and Emily Dickinson, have written compelling riddles that question the world and how it is perceived. By asking the listener or reader to complete them with an answer, riddles invite thought and discussion in a way that many other literary forms do not, but which interactive fiction does. Just as a real riddle requests an answer, interactive fiction requires input from the interactor. It also often provides an opportunity for the interactor to perform his or her understanding of the IF world: by having the player character act appropriately, the interactor demonstrates comprehension of the strange systems of a particular work. The riddle helps to explain how figuration and a negotiation of understanding can take place in interactive fiction.
Riddle Machines: The History and Nature of Interactive Fiction
Nick Montforthttp://nora.lis.uiuc.edu:3030/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405148641/9781405148641.xml&chunk.id=ss1-5-8&toc.depth=1&toc.id=ss1-5-8&brand=9781405148641_brand
QUOTES from Montfort; reformatted:
Interactive fiction works can be challenging for literary readers, even those interested in other sorts of electronic literature, because of the text-based interface and because of the way in which these works require detailed exploration, mapping, and solution. Works in this form are often less visually rewarding, and the rewards they do offer are only attained with time and effort. . . . Understanding how interactive fiction works, and how it has developed over the past three decades, is an essential part of the puzzle of literary computing.
Characteristics of interactive fiction
The parser and world model are essential to IF
. . . it is conventional to refer to the player character in the second person, a feature of interactive fiction that is often remarked upon because it is so uncommon in other types of literary writing.
Interactive fiction as potential narrative
- One perspective on interactive fiction is that it is potential narrative
Along with other useful perspectives (computer program, dialog system, simulation, game, riddle), the idea that interactive fiction is potential narrative encourages the consideration of how it is potential — what space of narratives is defined — and of how the elements of IF correspond to narrative elements
HISTORY AND CONTEXT [subheadings]